Vox Media Platform

Vox Media houses 8 brands on one core platform. Previously, each site had their own custom front-end code base. We've spent the last year unifying, refactoring, and thinking of brands beyond the website.

Four different article pages on the Unison platform.

Role

Senior Front-end Developer

Tools & Technology

Ruby on Rails

Webpack

Sass

Backbone

The Project

In early 2014, we embarked on a project to unify the 8 Vox Media brands and 300+ websites onto one core platform. We called this project Unison. Previously, our sites all shared core back-end functionality, but we had 8 completely separate front-end codebases. As we began adding brands to our platform, we realized this was absolutely not scalable.

This was a chance to start fresh! After years of building off an existing platform, we were able to start over and rethink how we do front-end development at Vox Media. We stared small: building a baseline of what a Vox Media website would be, and built in functionality to “theme” our sites, so brands could easily have a different set of styles (colors, typography, etc).